this post was submitted on 22 Jun 2026
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What is at Stake in the "Western Marxism" Debate? (cosmonautmag.com)
submitted 5 days ago by RedWizard@hexbear.net to c/marxism@hexbear.net
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cross-posted from: https://news.abolish.capital/post/58586

Reviewing the fallout over Gabriel Rockhill's critiques of Western Marxism, Donald Parkinson argues the controversy is ultimately a battle over what kind of intellectual culture the left needs.

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[–] timdrake@lemmy.ml 1 points 9 hours ago (1 children)

Marx managed to fully transcend Feuerbach through interacting with the social materialism of classical political economy, so it’s incorrect to say he didn’t have a better example. I would consider it “idealist” in the Marxist sense to see the lack of detail in Marx’s explication of alienation as explained by some inner “idealism” holding him back (there is something like this with dual textual discourse but it’s a reflection of Marx’s incomplete economics research); the reality is that he just did not have the information at this point for the detail/specificity seen in Capital.

You used the word “feeling” in your definition of alienation as described in TGI. Meanwhile the mature versions of Commodity fetishism and exploitation are direct relations to production that are measurable. I would call this advancing past a hegelianism towards a scientific notion

Commodity fetishism is a feeling and an idea/appearance, and not a direct relation of production nor directly measurable. This is actually a good example to show that there is nothing un-Marxist/“idealist” about the notion of alienation as a feeling.

[–] MLRL_Commie@hexbear.net 1 points 3 hours ago* (last edited 3 hours ago)

I see lacking in information to fully ground an idea as somewhere where idealism still lurks in the background. Im not condemning early Marx as not willing to get past his own hegelianism or idealism in critiquing terms, just literally saying that he still had a lifetime of throwing that shit off to go, and still at the end never could achieve it completely (looking at the unrigorous view of the state as a simple example). Im assigning no fault to him as a person or something. And of course he also had the English economists to follow for materialist analyses, I just mean in terms of people looking to assign philosophical rigour to materialism. Marx also was inspired by the materialism if Newton, Darwin, etc as scientists of course

I think commodity fetishism was something that Marx was working to make fully measurable and scientific (lacking information theory made this a monumental task). You can directly measure the loss of information in the commodity production process leading to a prices as we know them in capitalist production. The amount of info lost is a measure of the fetishism which directly replaces it by assigning the magical trait (of secretly containing all relevamt info) to the commodity itself.

I also am not here to say feelings can't be material, Im just saying that feelings are rigorous to base pur theories on. It's not 'bad' per se, just not as useful as concrete, measurable, scientific arguments.